ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Authoritarian Anthropocene: Twentieth-Century Party States and the Mobilization of Earth and Climate Knowledge

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session analyzes the development of earth, weather and climate knowledge in twentieth century authoritarian regimes. To what extent were party states able to harness the authority of the climate and earth sciences in new ways, and how much did their understandings of the atmosphere, earth and the environment contribute to the global infrastructure of these sciences? How much did scientists work towards these regimes? To what extent were other more contested forms of knowledge produced?

The construction of the party state entailed the co-optation of atmospheric and material environments. At the same time, authoritarian regimes (and scientists working towards them) mobilized the earth and climate sciences and transformed the earth system into new political instruments. It resulted in the expansion of technoscientific structures and new scientific practices, as investments in the earth system sciences were accelerated by scientists co-shaping strategic interests in planetary resources.

There was no single isolated model of ‘party-state knowledge’: first, in the many different ideological systems, scientific communities interacted in distinctive ways with the tools and infrastructures of the climate and earth sciences. Second, party-state regimes participated in a plural global system, to which also non-authoritarian states contributed, within a shared Cold War knowledge infrastructure.

This session interrogates the emergence of authoritarian forms of environmental knowledge in systems extremely entangled with war, occupation, colonization and/or forced labor. Authoritarian climate knowledge was often highly invasive, both intervening in the global environment and on local bodies. Sanatoriums, prisons, labor camps, and extreme environments became sites of authoritarian knowledge on a scale not seen before in Europe.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Nils Guettler, Universität Wien

Individual Presentations

• A Climate of Scarcity: Meteorology and the Building of Fascist Autarky, 1929-1939 - Angelo Caglioti, Barnard College, Columbia University

• From Cosmic Physics to the Bioclimatological Lebensraum: Engineering a ‘Supplementary Meteorology’ in Germany and Austria 1934-1944 - Robert-Jan Wille, Utrecht University

• Captive Climates: Political incarceration, Health and Environment in the Cold War Mediterranean - Milica Prokic, University of Strathclyde

• Mobilizational Technocracy: Permafrost and the National Science Campaign on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway in Late Mao- and Hua Guofeng-era China, 1974-1978 - Jason Chan, Harvard University

Session Organizer

• Robert-Jan Wille, Utrecht University